Tony Curran is one of those fingers-in-all-the-(local-art-related)-pies kind of people. Director and founder of the traveling Watch This Space gallery, resident curator for our good friends at The Wall, blogger for the Australian Centre for Photography blog (coming soon!) and a practicing artist himself. Not only does he know more about art than we do, but he can write about it sans wank – an unfortunately rare skill.

We’ve invited him into our blog to review something special every couple of weeks. This week it’s Icelandic art star Olafur Eliasson’s new exhibition at the MCA – Take Your Time – running until April 11 2010. And: those photos up there are by Alexander Krauss, courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

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Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time

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Appreciating Danish-born Icelandic art star Olafur Eliasson’s work from a book, DVD or website would be near impossible, because unlike many art practices Eliasson’s work is not a portfolio of two-dimensional or three-dimensional still or moving images. They’re larger than life immersive time-based installations that couldn’t be represented photographically, or even through video footage. In fact the works depend heavily on how the context of the physical installation affects the mechanics of the audience’s visual perception and experience.

It’s experience that Eliasson delivers in his exhibition titled Take Your Time currently on show at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art until early April. The works in this show evolve over time, some subtly and some dramatically and they are experiential rather than image based.  Participation could be one way to describe it, but not the kind where you actually have to assume a role.  Eliasson abandons the figurative and the abstract, allowing narrative to be told through the subject, his audience, and his media – be it through his lights, filters, architecture or sculpture.

The exhibition highlight, 360° room for all colours is, as the title suggests, a 360° room where fluorescent coloured lights are programmed to change, sometimes quickly and other times gradually.  The work feels like a 3D Mark Rothko at times, massaging your eyes’ colour receptors and offering periods of fully immersive moods, temperatures and environments.  The large environments from Eliasson forces the viewer to reconsider our relationship to colour and colours’ relationship to time and place, whether it be lights changing or the audience’s perceptions changing to adjust to the intensity, rhythm, and colour of the environment. The works force us to place ourselves in a greater context and question environmental normality.

A simpler but even stronger example is Room For One Colour (1997), a bright room lit with yellow-orange fluorescent lights which do two things: make everything look like a Warhol screen print, and offer up retinal afterimages (impressions left on your vision from an intense visual stimulus). We begin to use our eyes to feel the environment, as well as to see it.

Make sure you consult the map you get with your ticket so that you don’t miss any of the pieces (I missed two).  I’m planning on checking it out a second time – the first visit felt so good.

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Reviewed by Tony Curran

Posted by steph in Art, Gatecrashers

Tags: iceland, MCA, olafur eliasson, Tony Curran, tony curran gatecrash